Methods for separating cells from biological samples are important to many clinical procedures and to scientific research methods. In cord blood banking, umbilical cord blood may be volume reduced using a cell separation process before entering cryopreservation to reduce the long term storage cost. In cellular therapy, certain cell types may be enriched before transfusing into a patient to increase engraftment. Current filtration technologies for cell separation often fail to preserve cell viability and typically have low yields. For example, cell separation techniques that rely on size exclusion subject fragile cells to shear stress causing cell damage or lysis. The accumulation of cellular debris accelerates device fouling and clogging. Often cells isolated using such methods are activated, altered, damaged, or killed. Microfluidic devices are limited by the volume of sample that they can process. Simply increasing flow rate through such devices is unsuccessful because as flow rate increases, the shear stress of cell moving through the device also increases. Thus, shear stress limits the volumetric throughput. It is thus desirable to provide a method and device for particle filtration that does not use size exclusion as the filtration mechanism. In particular, it is desirable to provide a method and device for cell filtration that does not easily clog, that has high volumetric throughput, that is physically compact, and that does not damage or activate the cells.